Running from Coronavirus (Part 8)

The response in China was severe by American standards. A total lock-down that spread out from Wuhan to envelop the entire country. What is scary about this kind of response is that given China has an authoritarian government with a track record of taking swift and decisive actions to control its populace, be it through regulation, media. or boots on the ground, the situation can always change quickly, for better or for worse. Some of the commentaries by the American media about this lock-down was reflective of a common, though racist (IMO), belief, that China could lock down its citizen because its citizens were willing to put up with being locked down. Or in other words, that Chinese people are afraid of their government and that is why they are willing to unquestionably follow its directives. Or in other, othering and identity affirming rhetorics, Americans are too fiercely independent to tolerate being locked down.

A few things about differences between China and the US. First, the United States does not have the resources and structures to do the kind of lock down that China did. Most Americans don't live in large housing complexes but neighborhoods, be it suburban or rural. The housing complexes that Americans do live in are generally not staffed by a deep squad of security personal.

时代中央花 (Shídài zhōngyāng huāyuán), Kunshan, China

Moreover, the constitution of the United States gives different states the power to make their own rules in terms of laws and regulations. Moreover, there is no equivalent of the tracking apps used in China, i.e. Wechat. While companies in the US certainty have that capability, Google and Facebook, for example, aren't obligated to share their data with the US government. Whereas in China, the deal has always been that if you set up business in China, the China government has access to this data. Beyond regulations and societal differences; historically, China has already dealt with SARS and swine flu and more or less figured out ways to slow or stop the spread of the infectious diseases they've encountered. From a citizenry perspective, this means that people have already had similar experiences and know the ropes of quarantine, wearing masks, temperature checks, etc. All said,  given some of the strengths of China society such as an ample and well organized supply of labor, an advanced internet ecosystem (and yes, it is more advanced than the US) including convenient food delivery apps, density of population, and prior successful experiences controlling infectious disease, China's response makes sense.

Yet, there were arguments about China's response that I did hear from friends and in stories on the internet. One is that the lock-down keeps China safe. This is an argument that twins with arguments made by advocates of surveillance, the idea that more cameras, security guards, and tracking apps reduces crime and makes people's lives better. In this instance, it allows the public health system to make data-driven decisions about how to manage infected populations.

Cameras and lights, Tienanmen Square

Another argument came out of reports in Wuhan during February and March, that some of the quarantine measures were too extreme and coercive and restricted people's rights. More broadly, arguments surfaced about a state-sponsored message (i.e. propaganda) that the Chinese people should be proud of their ability to hunker down and make it through this difficult time, a patriotic and nationalistic message of collective unity. There were counter-arguments that this kind of propaganda swept under the rug the Chinese government's initial inaction/obfuscation about the crisis, painting those who criticized the government response as hindrances to the national recovery effort.

Asides from debates in American right-wing media about China's culpability for the pandemic, I was never actually involved in any kind of "debate" about the China government response that bore any relationship to actual events in China. Of course I'm not a citizen of China....But, all of this happened so fast there wasn't a moment to even wonder what China should do: They shutdown Wuhan before most of the world knew there was a serious problem. Similar in some sense to some of the debates that would come to happen in the US, how much one can trust the government are at the core of many of these arguments, a "collectivist" approach to problem solving where China's central government is the all-powerful fulcrum. These differences in mind, as far as we know China has gotten past the first wave of infections without a massive loss of life. As far as we know, because as usual the integrity of the data coming out of China is under question. Perhaps if I could speak and read Chinese I would have a different opinion but for now I'm more or less reporting second-hand information mixed with what I know about living in China.

Either way, from the perspective of Western style media transparency, the China government approach to policy making does not appear to parallel US political discussions about the pros and cons of Covid-19 responses. On the other hand, there are some similarities in terms of making the government the focal point. Though in the case of the US, that its relatively open political and policy making systems mandate a different kind of participation from the public, which these days begin with the sentiment that the US government, be it Republicans and Trump or Pelosi's "Dems and Libs" are not to be trusted. Contemporary US political debate starts with a pre-rhetorical othering upon which public debate performs variations on ideas of free expression, be it the right to individual choice or the right to equal opportunity. Thus, in the United States, we've approached solutions to the virus problem differently from China and frankly, the US federal response has been a disaster. The US has the largest number of Covid-related deaths in the world by a large margin. I'm not going to dwell on the facts of this disaster, but instead expand on the politicization and particular rhetorical topoi, that is, common place arguments, of the American response to the crisis.

Many Americans have had a response to Covid in-line with global health recommendations, that is, lock-downs, masks, social distancing, contact tracing, adequate amounts of testing, etc. in order to "flatten the curve." As I've observed with friends and family and being out in public, many folks have been following guidelines and many have not. More to the point of the argument itself, I'm personally persuaded that these safety measures will reduce health risk to myself and others. In other words, I believe in the expert doctors and scientists that I should change my behavior to minimize this risk. In material terms then, the state and local governments have put out guidelines, wrapped up playground equipment, and shut down businesses. I believe that despite the economic, psychological, and personal cost, these measure are not only the best way to save lives, but the best way to bring the economy back over the long term. While it is absolutely true that that economic cost is significant, it stands in my mind that following the advice of global and public health professionals is the best way forward. Granted I have been able to keep my job and economically not much has changed for me, and further, I don't have any particular need to eat at restaurants, go to bars, get a haircut, and generally am content maintaining social distance and entertaining myself at home. I miss swimming and basketball, but overall, I buy into the idea that a unified response lead by the public health professionals will minimize the loss of human life.

How we might enact a public health response in the United States can be different than how China or Germany might do it, as not only do we have different systems of governance and varied institutions to regulate and oversee a response to this crisis, but folks here also use particular kinds of arguments that might be used to persuade citizens to "buy into" a particular course of action. None of which I'd say are unique to the United States. That is, you should stay inside and social distance because a) the virus can kill you, and b) if you are infected you will infect other people (who may die). It's a pretty simple argument from causation. This message has been amplified by public officials and media, including Trump, Cuomo, and other state governor's daily briefings and the non-stop media coverage and constantly updating infection and death rates. More to the point of coercive power however, I actually can't eat at a restaurant or go swimming because those institutions are/were closed. I can't go to church (though in my case, I can't go to the meditation center). I've read that police have been enforcing these regulations (unevenly) though I have yet to personally be asked to, say, wear a mask or social distance. That is to say, the threat of violence or some other retribution for failing to follow the rules loom underneath the modern world though rarely is this threat said out loud in polite society. A final bit that I find convincing is that the rest of the world is taking similar steps. And moreover, with the exception of the UK and Sweden, I don't see significant global debate or a wide variety of policies enacted to fight the virus, but more or less the same steps, that is: limits on travel, social distancing, masks, and staying indoors until conditions improve. All these measures seem like common sense at this point.

Yet, some have responded to the media and policy makers with skepticism, seeing these guidelines or restrictions as infringing on personal freedoms. These notions of freedom and the rhetorics surrounding them also reflected in philosophies of "states rights," where each of the fifty states has the right to make their own decisions about the crisis. Similarly, this argument is applied to the corporate establishment. From the first coronavirus task force press conference, Trump revealed his approach, which involves a deep trust in the idea that crises could be handled through the free market. Along with Fauci and Birx's discussion of some of the health science around Covid and that weird, fake flow chart for a google service that didn't exist, Trump presided over a long lineup of "business leaders" discussing their plans. CEOs from Walgreens, testing companies, banks, insurance, and other companies spoke briefly under the premise that they were working with the government to come up with a solution to the spreading virus. The CEO of Walmart, another multimillionaire slightly over weight white man that I had never seen before in my life, announced that stores would donate their parking lots to testing efforts. A week or so after these press conferences started, the large majority of the bi-partisan approved bailout money was gifted to the large companies with little oversight.

Trump, March 11th, 2020

Thus, the conflation between individual freedoms and free markets has come to a head, where a segment of Americans, some rich, some poor, have come to believe that regulations of any kind are a form of oppression and that preserving the values of this country means a moral obligation to do whatever you feel is right, regards of how that might affect others.

One way to look at the difference between the US and China response is from the individualist vs. collectivist perspective. It's an old way and I've discussed it before on this blog, but in this instance, this idea has a particular relevance. Obviously the federal response and the response of those pushing back against lock-downs and other restrictions is operating from an individualist point of view where the rights of individuals, which now includes individual companies, is more important than the safety and strength of the collective. The US, in this instance, has done a particularly poor job controlling the virus but that doesn't mean that other Western countries did not do a commendable job. Countries like Germany, New Zealand, and Australia, for example, are Western countries that over the last three months were able to preserve individual freedoms and at the same time contain the virus. These differences in terms of collectivism vs. individualism are not about which is the better way of doing things but about what each means allows and disallows. That said, collectivist responses to the virus, which promotes the sacrifice of individual desires and expression in favor of the well being of the whole, has proven to be better at containing the spread of the virus. To many in and outside of the US, the response here has been baffling in terms of its inability to keep people from dying. Instead of human lives, the federal and some state responses have prioritized the health of the economy. Bailouts for big companies and the push to reopen regardless if a given state can follow the Center for Disease Control's guidelines can be read as an extension of individualist ideology in that it's about an individual's or individual companies' choice to reopen.

Here then are two radically different strategies for dealing with coronavirus, each built on a scaffold of ideology and culture. The one focuses on human health and the other seems primarily concerned with personal freedoms; that is, a rhetoric of personal freedom that parallels the growth of neoliberal free market deregulation, the kind that has gutted public institutions in the United States over the last forty years. While it's obvious that the federal response is largely about Trump's vulnerabilities in an election year and his desire to preserve the perception of his economic success, the result of this strategy could be better for the United States in the long term if, in fact, the virus is here to stay and if vaccination attempts are unsuccessful. Or in other words, if the world will need to live with coronavirus, learning how to do so earlier will be an advantage in the long run in terms of economic and maybe even public health measures. When I was in China at the beginning of this, my question then and one that I still have is if strict lock-down measures are put into place, how does one lift them and go back to normal? Or, at what point do we say that it's safe? China's zero tolerance policy has meant that now that they've made it this far, it seems unlikely that they would switch to a more relaxed model. Case-in-point: Within the last two days China has locked down Jilin, a city of 4.5 million people due to an outbreak of 34 new cases of coronavirus. While in no way am I saying that the US federal response has been even remotely competent, however, I wonder how lock-downs, over time, can prevent the spread of this highly contagious virus in a globalized world. I wonder if it's really possible, at this point anyway, to run from the coronavirus.

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For now though, we'll see which ways of approaching this problem will produce the best results. It's too soon to know where any of this will go. Personally, I've been ashamed by the response of Americans who have advocated for the right to get haircuts over public health, by the corruption of our federal government, by the breathtaking lack of bureaucratic competence, by a political culture that is more interested in arguing with the other side than it is in finding solutions to problems. All these points though are just headlines in the media-sphere; talking points that hide the generous and generative nature of people. I am looking forward to going back to China though I'm not sure when that will be. It's likely that if I am able to fly back in July I will have to quarantine for two weeks in a hotel. By myself. That would be a bummer but there are worse fates so long as I can stay healthy. Regardless, it's summer. My teaching is done and my writing projects for the next couple months lay ahead of me. I'll get to it, but if anything changes I'll let you know.

Running from Coronavirus (Part 7)

Teaching sustained me through the Spring. Sustained in the sense that though both my living situation was fluid and the wider world was / still is struggling, the constant rigor of needing to maintain a schedule kept chaos from coloring the every day. Two courses, sixteen students in total, papers, class meetings, conferences, assignments, and faculty council duties meant I didn't have a lot of time to reflect on the present and imagine the future beyond the semester. To make it through the end of the semester I needed control of my living space and a stable internet connection, which was achieved relatively easily. Meanwhile, the bulk of my students were still in mainland China on lock down. I could see their faces in whatever space they had managed to carve out at their parent's house: offices, kitchen tables, and childhood bedrooms. Our Zoom session met twice a week, either early in the morning or later at night, a twelve hour time difference between Shanghai and Eastern Standard time zones. For most of my students, our synchronous sessions were the bulk of the interactive face time they were receiving, as many of their courses ran asynchronously or as a narrated PPT.

Snow man, Indiana

Our first meeting over Zoom was when I was still in Australia and I felt guilty being in a kind of paradise, gallivanting on the beach while they were locked in their homes. In Indiana, still winter, I didn't feel as guilty.

Unbelievably, everything seemed to be as it was. Australia was all new to me but Indiana, a place where I lived for five years, I could certifiably say was operating as usual. After two days in a hotel and and five days in an Airbnb, my girlfriend (Ed. note: Tyler's girlfriend is finishing up her PhD in Indiana which is why he returned to Indiana) and I found a cheap but acceptable sublet in a big housing complex near campus that was mostly populated by students. I got a temporary gym membership to go swimming and play basketball. I ate at familiar restaurants (for a week) and worked at the public library. For three weeks things seemed normal. When I got into longer conversations with people around town, a clerk at the book store, an old basketball acquaintance, a friend of friend, I'd say at some point after the subject of China and the virus was broached, "It's coming here too. It's just a matter of time." But this sentiment didn't seem to land. A few of my friends had been stock piling supplies and preparing, but most folks were not. Being in China and traveling had trained me to be careful/paranoid: to constantly wash my hands, not to touch metal door handles, to hold my breath in elevators, to wear gloves when I grocery shopped, not get too close to strangers, and wear a mask.

By the beginning of March the virus started to overtly manifest in the States and the government started to pay more attention and the rest that story flits between disaster. The primary thing that has made this experience bearable has been being with Jo and Dave in Australia, being with my students online, and being with my girlfriend in Indiana. For me, what was true in China is still true in Indiana: I'm not afraid of the virus as much as I'm afraid of getting stuck alone, be it in an empty apartment for months on end, in the hospital, or in some place where I don't know anyone. Running from the coronavirus has been more about running from the prospect of loneliness than it has been about health. Which is not a fear that, at least in my life, is entirely limited to global pandemic health events. At any rate, I'm winding down here in terms of what I wanted to say, and so I'll end the recall of events.

Running from Coronavirus (Part 6)

I spent the next twelve days or so taking walks on the beach, swimming a bit (though my landlocked and ocean-devoid life experiences hadn't prepared me for the fierce waves of the Australian ocean), hiking, monitoring the news, hanging out with Jo and Dave, and strategizing about when to head back to the States. The plan for university wide online teaching was that courses would start three weeks after they date they were supposed to start, giving folks enough time to recalibrate their courses and get settled wherever they were, as nearly all the non-Chinese national faculty had left  China. That said, the graduate programs  decided to move their timeline up, and so after a few emails, I discovered that I also needed to start teaching again immediately. This was a bummer. So to qualify my description of the twelve days in Australia, all of the above occurred after I got my work done for the day. Teaching online was a bit of an adjustment but for the most part I was able to run my class as I would in person, given my small class size (only eight students in each of my two sections), the relative ease of having synchronous class meetings over Zoom, and the fact that it was a writing course. Scenes from Australia:

Hiking with Jake

Looking north, a rainy day in Hastings Point

Cool dude in all blue outfit at Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary (note: I never would have thought that I'd be so enamored by koala's but they are amazing creatures. I highly recommend visiting this place.)

Democratic Debate, February 2020

Meanwhile, beyond the order to reduce air travel from China to the US, things seemed to be more or less as usual back in the States. My family and friends implored me to leave China, the threat of an authoritarian government plus a scary virus equaling an strong impetus to leave. "I'm glad you got out," wrote a friend. Yet, it seemed to me that eventually the virus would be everywhere and what China was going through would happen in other countries around the world. Though I am not the first person to write this, I think the lack of preparedness on behalf of the States, to name one country, was partly a function of, at best, a habitual othering of Chinese people and at worst, racism. As in, "China might have a bad virus but China is China, and they are so different than us! Their government is authoritarian and they eat bats! It could never happen here!" (Strawman, 2020). This is why calling it a "China virus" is not only mildly racist, but also detrimental to public health: the term insidiously suggests the unspoken belief that viral epidemics are something that only happen in places like China and to people like the Chinese. To this day, these "terministic screens" (as the rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke named them) are leading the attention of Americans away from combating the virus to combating the idea of China or each other.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I've been back in the States for almost four months now and the hyperpartisan politics of contemporary American life have already recalibrated my memory such that Australia seems like a long time ago. I flew back to the United States on a Wednesday morning, February 12th, Brisbane to Los Angeles with a connecting flight to Indianapolis. When I was checking in the Qantas airline folk asked if I had been to China in the last two weeks. Though at this moment, that question invokes nostalgia for a time when coronavirus wasn't everywhere. At the time it had the power to keep people off of planes. I answered yes, and they led me to another counter where one of the ticket agents scoffed, and said, "He's an American. He can get on the plane." I didn't know to interpret this as a disdain for for my nationality or something else related to safety. Hardly anyone was wearing a mask at the airport. In Los Angeles I almost made it through until the last bit, when the customs officer seemed to take a bit more time for me. After confirming that I'd been in China, another officer lead me down a level to large room full of empty chairs. There were about six people in the room, all of them health workers or airport people, all wearing masks. They asked me to fill out a form with my address where I'd be saying, asked if I had any symptoms, took my temperature, and gave me a pamphlet with some phone numbers in case I felt sick. And then they let me go.